[whatwg] [web-forms] Add ACCESSKEY to SELECT

[Matthew Raymond]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>>    Is this really needed in light of the fact that <label> supports 
>>> |accesskey|?
> 
> Besides my other mail, the thing is that it is already supported, 
> probably because page authors requested it or used it. Now would be a 
> good time to standardize these implementations and use cases.

    I think the biggest reason some browsers have non-standard support 
for |accesskey| on the <select> element is that many people don't use 
<label> to label controls, and don't use <label>'s |accesskey| instead 
of <input>'s as recommended in the HTML 4.01 specification. Many 
webmasters simply use pure text as a label and use |accesskey| directly 
on the controls with no regard for whether the control element has an 
|accesskey| attribute or not.

    It was probably a mistake making |accesskey| an attribute of <input> 
in the first place, since <label> would otherwise be required for access 
keys and therefore be more widely used. If anything, |accesskey| in 
<input> should be depreciated to prevent the continuing use of labels 
that have no semantic association to their controls.

> Like it was done with AUTOCOMPLETE, albeit less important.

    The |autocomplete| attribute didn't have a workaround using valid 
and recommended HTML markup like <select accesskey=""> does.